Making sense of our ongoing social catastrophe. (An Orthosphere blog.)

February 10, 2014

Proponents of gay "marriage" (for the sake of my poor fingers, let the sarcastic quotation marks be merely implied from henceforth) often accuse their opponents of homophobia, a kind of pop-psychological diagnosis that requires no degree to confer, which serves to delegitimize any argument against gay marriage by asserting that it stems from nothing but irrational disgust.

Setting aside, for a moment, the unfairness of the characterization, is disgust irrational?

Disgust appears to be a pretty universal feature of the human condition. I can only assume this is because it serves a valid end. All humans, regardless of race or culture or other peculiarities, developed the ability to communicate verbally precisely because it conferred an unequivocal survival advantage. Likewise with any other relatively universal trait.

So what advantage does disgust toward homosexuality confer? For one thing, homoesxual behavior (at least [or especially] male homosexual behavior) is a disease vector. The peculiarly predatory sexual behaviors common to modern gay men aggravate this; a not insubstantial number of practicing homosexuals (about three-quarters according to some sources) report having had over 100 partners. This is simply not a lifestyle conducive to good health -- in fact, it's conducive to widespread and early death, exactly like we're seeing today. Disgust innoculates communities against it, leading them to avoid, shun, and exile (literally or figuratively) homosexual men in their midst.

So the etiology of man's disgust toward homosexuals is completely rational even if you grant the left's materialist/biodeterminist presuppositions. Why, then, does modern man hate it?

Because disgust, like heterosexuality, arises spontaneously from human nature -- and modern man detests the natural order of being and wishes to destroy it.

So he will embrace literally anything that is contrary to it (decriminalize it, then legalize it, then demand that it be publicly tolerated, then demand that it be publicly endorsed, then demand that it be subsidized), and oppose literally anything that arises from it.

Because human nature itself is "homophobic," the (true) rightist wants homosexuality criminalized or at least stigmatized -- while the leftist would rather keep homosexuality and abolish human nature, instead.

I believe the reasons for marriage falling out of favor with Americans are many, including my own clinical observations that the vast majority of married people consider their unions a source of pain, not pleasure, and that too few of them are equipped with the psychological and behavioral tools to achieve true intimacy or maintain real passion. When the architecture of a relationship is airless and seemingly without exit (without bankrupting your family by hiring lawyers and having your kids pack overnight bags every week), people will eventually learn to steer clear of it.

Perhaps no factor, however, is more responsible for the decline of marriage in America than government participation in it. The fact is that getting a marriage license means, essentially, signing a Draconian contract with the state to manage the division of your estate in the event of a divorce, without ever having read that contract.

The contract, if it included all the relevant laws pertaining to divorce, child custody, spousal support and other relevant matters, would probably run hundreds of pages. And what’s more, the contract, once signed, may be changed by the state legislature at any time, leaving the parties to it with no recourse.

This all means that getting married in America is—in the current scheme—an act of self-abandonment which subjugates one to government in a more infantilizing fashion than nearly any other voluntary action you could take.

Actions have consequences. So it is no surprise that volunteering to be lorded over by the state would result in feelings of confinement while married. Nor is it any surprise that signing over one’s rights to self-determination to the state in such dramatic fashion would result in the state over-using its power to dictate how married couples ought to conduct themselves in the event of a divorce—even if they have no children.

And it is also predictable that people would eventually find this distasteful, because human beings instinctively love liberty, especially in matters as personal as love and the raising of families.

The solution is obvious: Get the state entirely out of the marriage business. No more marriage licenses. No more special treatment of married couples by the IRS or any other facet of government. No state ever had a legitimate claim to issue marriage licenses, to begin with, since marriage is a spiritual commitment and quite often, a religious one. And it is, fundamentally, an intensely personal one based in autonomy—until city hall gets involved and messes everything up.

Even the pseudoconservatives are on board with the marginalization of religion, the abolition of traditional institutions, and the modern assault on the natural order of being.

If you weren't already boycotting these intolerable idiots for life, do so now.

Modernity offered, in contrast to the experiential paradigm of the vast majority of human history, a very different vision of man, society, in the universe. As such, it needed a narrative to establish the legitimacy of its vision, which we may summarize thusly:

Primitive man lived in darkness and ignorance, kept their by religious superstition-peddlers. We enlightened thinkers and scientists succeeded in liberating man from his squalor and have set him along the path toward his gradual perfection.

This narrative may have been believable in the 17th and 18th centuries. We, today, know better. Man's liberation from religion has not perfected him. It has loosed horrors beyond counting on the world.

The "crisis of modernity," as such, is the spontaneous recognition of the falseness of this narrative -- and therefore the falseness of everything which has come to be because of it, including our social order, our ethical life, and our self-understanding.

Because modernity is false (and everyone knows it), it cannot be sustained. There are only two options: to return to that which is normative, historical, spontaneous, and organic, that is, to religion, to the traditional family, and various other institutions; or else to soldier on ahead, dropping only those parts of the modern condition that clearly cannot be salvaged.

Western society by and large has chosen the latter course. It has elected to drop, among other things, the idea of a coherent narrative; indeed, it is now characterized by suspicion or distrust of narratives. This, we call "postmodernism." It has also jettisoned its concern for reason, rationality, and the realness of reality. This, too, is part of postmodernism; we call it "deconstructionism." It has retained everything else of modernity, including its parousiasm and dialectic historicism.

But modernism-lite is really no more sustainable than was modernism-regular.

Let's also not forget the warmongering chickenhawkery, or the emotive revolutionary bluster we hear from "conservatives" any time some policy is enacted that they dislike (forgetting, always, the Biblical admonition to submit to authority). Their revolutionary impulse easily matches that of the left, which I suppose stands to reason; but the left is at least honest about its revolutionary ambitions, as history has amply demonstrated.

These are the people who, in the interests of fighting the really important battles of making sure we get payroll tax cuts that offer people like me a whopping $8 a biweekly paycheck, have agreed to shut up about our ongoing abortion holocaust, or at least agree to do nothing really serious to put an end to it. And who cheer, in the interests of supporting the troops, the taxpayer-subsidized glorification of sodomy.

I absolutely detest American elections and everything about them, not least of all the hysteria. Each successive election is said to be even more important than the last -- the stakes are higher this time! the future of the republic hinges on this pivotal moment! -- yet this is the exact opposite of the truth: each successive election (regardless of who wins) further cements the leftist consensus and witnesses the further organizational, intellectual, spiritual, and moral collapse of the right.

So vilely leftist has modern political discourse become that the chief criticism of Ron Paul circulating among ostensibly right-wing "thinkers" is that he isn't sufficiently left-wing. Check out Jonah Goldberg's criticisms of Paul not being antiracist enough. (Goldberg... how I detest the man. Henceforth, his name shall ne'er be written again on this blog: he shall be known only as Dagon -- in the Lovecraftian, not the Amoritic, sense).

Look, there's plenty not to like about Paul's politics, but this isn't it. Why in the world should the right be enforcing the left's strictures, especially when we all know and complain about their obvious bogosity? I'm no fan of white nationalim (which I regard as dangerously misguided, especially given that the majority of reactionaries' enemies are white -- and almost certainly a majority of whites are reactionaries' enemies), but surely we can acknowledge that particularist loyalty, properly constrained, is generally a good? Must we indulge the left's inquisitorial impulse? Must we adopt their irrational value system? Must we embrace their puritanical spirit?

Break out your barf bags; this election's going to be especially nauseating.

When a Marxist atheist like the late Christopher Hitchens says he opposes religion because he wants man to be "free," we know exactly what he means. He means that he wants to destroy the natural order of being because it imposes on man duties and obligations he is not free to choose or avoid. He is, in some sense, declaring war on God -- and thus on reality itself. He doesn't merely object to political tyranny. He objects to (what he sees as) the tyranny imposed on him by biology, by the circumstances of birth, by his own nature as a human being. "Freedom" for him is the total freedom of his will, unfettered even by the material facts of reality.

All this makes sense to us. We recognize it for what it is: rebellion against God, as old and uninteresting as the demons which inspired it.

But it makes no sense to him. Our talk of God and the natural order of being sounds like gibberish to him, and he responds to it as if it were gibberish, with a kind of frustrated dismissal and gasping irritation. The best he can come up with as to why people don't see the world as he does or experience reality in the same way he does is that they're just stupid, irrational, superstitious, or dishonest (but he will continue to say, always, that reason is enough, that man is a reasonable creature, and he will never reconcile this in his head with the fact that, by his own standard, the vast majority of man is irrational); and he will continue to believe it even as he meets plenty of intelligent, reasonable, and diligent people who disagree with him.

This is a serious, glaring deficiency on the part of the modern mode of being: it cannot account for the fullness of the human experience, even as the reactionary mode of being can -- and does.

The whole modern mode of being is such a stupidly rickety thing, hastily slapped and bandaged together, gushing steam from its joints and creaking noisily as it stumbles blindly through the world. Nothing but ignorance of and dishonesty about its own nature keeps it going. So radically deficient. And that which is deficient cannot last: entropy will claim it before long.

February 08, 2014

Assuming Muslim Tim Tebow would be as high-profile as Christian Tim Tebow, they'd probably regard him with suspicion and contempt as he prostrates himself on the sidelines facing east, touching his forehead to the turf. And probably, in this alternate universe, some Salon columnist would be asking, "What if Tim Tebow Were Christian?" and he would be adored by the leftist establishment instead of slathered with its hatred.

Evidently, we're to regard Christians as hypocrites for not feeling warm-n'-fuzzy about Muslim athletes. Why should they, though? Christians worship Christ, not generic displays of piety. It's precisely this that makes them not hypocrites and their religion not merely the empty and insubstantial theatrics their secular enemies accuse them of being. Why should they feel anything but unease toward the practitioners of what they see as a false religion? No one reasonably expects anything else from Muslims.

Here's a better question: what if Tim Tebow were Christian but America was Muslim? Would the social reaction to him be analagous if the roles were reversed and it was Christian America reflecting on Muslim Tebow? I think we all know the answer to this.

The normative simply describes general norms, pertaining to the forms or essences in which people participate. A norm is universal only in a loose sense: it describes the universal form or essence. It doesn't require that any particular person fall under the purview of that norm.

A good example: men are taller than women is a normative statement, because they are. There are to my knowledge no societies in which men are shorter than women, and we would all rightly regard such a society as an aberration and question what has produced it. It doesn't matter that there are individual men who are quite short and individual women who are quite tall -- these are deviations from the norm. Very short men and very tall women are exceptional.

(Does the exception void the rule? If it did, it would not be an exception. If it wasn't an exception, it could not void the rule.)

In a loose sense, the norm is a statistical average; but it's not precisely the same thing. The statistical average is the mathematical expression of the norm. It is evidence that the norm exists without being the same thing.

Or consider "the reproductive system is ordered toward reproduction." Hardly a leap. That's what it's there for, that's why we have one. Common sense, as they say. A normative statement. Everything we know about it lends credence to that claim: the nature of the act, the nature of the desire for the act, the physical structure of the organs involved, etc.

Yet somehow the fact that the reproductive system doesn't always lead to reproduction (whether due to chronic or periodic infertility, withdrawal, the fact that the system can be used in some other manner such as with masturbation, etc.) is evidence that there is no norm, to the modern mind. Because he interprets it universally.

In other words, the modern mind will accept a statement only if it is true everywhere and always, when r = 1. But r = 1 only in the case of tautologies, so nothing but tautologies are true; so, functionally, nothing is true.

But just because r does not = 1 does not mean that r = 0.

There are, in fact, an infinite range of values between 0 and 1.

How better to express the modern condition than as totally insensibility to the infinite?

Recently, my girlfriend took me to a Vietnamese restaurant. I'd been to one before but never tried what was apparently the staple dish: pho, a soup dish of beef, noodles, and various greens in a thin broth. Her description of it sounded wonderful. But what was placed in front of me was a stinking, fetid bowl of animal waste, reeking to high heaven. Girlfriend loved it and happily devoured hers, but no sooner did I put a slice of beef to my tongue than my eyes began to water. It tasted antiseptic, like meat that had been deep-fried in a vat of hand soap. I promptly swallowed (without so much as chewing) and pushed the bowl away, touching not one more bite.

Growing up, I'd always been a picky eater. I was the kid who would sit at the table for hours, sullenly pushing his food around on the plate because he couldn't stomach one more bite. (Parents were not very understanding in this regard). The worst dish, the one I could tolerate least, was mother's chicken gumbo. I've simmered down a lot as I've grown older, and some things I once couldn't tolerate I now love -- sauerkraut is right up there. But keep the gumbo away from me.

Anyway, girlfriend and I sat and tried to figure out what the problem was with the pho. Our dishes both tasted exactly the same, or at least both tasted the same to each of us -- good for her, nauseous for me. Clearly, I was reacting to something in the recipe that she wasn't.

Cilantro lovers say it has a refreshing, lemony or limelike flavor that complements everything from guacamole to curry. It's a key ingredient in a range of ethnic cuisines, including Mexican, Indian and Chinese.

But few foods elicit such heated negative reactions. Many people say it tastes soapy, rotten or just plain vile. Just a whiff of it is enough to make them push away their plates. ...

Cilantro haters complain that it is showing up in unexpected places. Erin Hollingsworth, a 26-year-old editor at an environmental Web site, says she detected it in a bowl of Manhattan clam chowder she ordered at a New York lunch place.

"I thought to myself: 'No, it couldn't be. Really. Is this a joke? Who puts cilantro in Manhattan clam chowder?'" she wrote in her blog, "I Hate Cilantro: A Look Inside the Life of a Cilantro Hater and Food Lover." Ms. Hollingsworth says she now lies to waiters, telling them she's allergic to cilantro. "People take you seriously that way," she says.

Could also explain why I hate pico de gallo, which tastes the same to me.